Remembrance's Blog (24)

Hardly anyone ever sets foot in these two cemeteries anymore. For that matter, hardly anyone knows they exist. One of them was considered lost for decades. They are islands of isolation in an unforgiving wilderness, off-trail, not even a footpath or manway leading to them. The people have been dead for over a century. They certainly rest in profound peace, but rare is it that anyone visits to offer their respects. And so these gravesites provide us an opportunity to return to the roots…

For those attending the 25th annual Wilderness Wildlife Week at the LeConte Center in Pigeon Forge, beginning this Saturday, it is an exciting time of year, to be sure. All Wilderness Wildlife Week events are free of charge and open to the public.

We are honored to be presenters this year. Our presentation "Remembrance: Backcountry Cemeteries in Great Smoky Mountains National Park" is scheduled on Thursday, January 29, 2015, 1:30pm to 2:30pm in the North 3 event room. We invite…

Walking back to Maddron Cemetery you pass evidence of how things used to be, how things are not anymore. The cemetery lies behind what was once a home, once a hub of activity, long gone. Now there is only silence.

You will never get to the trailhead using the outdated directions in the trail guides, which tell you to take Laurel Springs Road, off US-321, 15.4 miles east of Gatlinburg. The bridge washed out…

Visiting the old cemeteries is like going back in time - except there is a veil between you and those people. You can never quite reach across the line. Revisiting a cemetery you have already seen is like going back to going back, a little disorienting. The cemeteries are frozen in time, but time itself is not frozen. All in one instant you see how nothing changes and everything changes.

The recent GoSmokies hike and picnic gave us the opportunity to return to Dorsey Cemetery,…

(This post has been revised and reposted to clarify the attendance requirements. The event is open to all.)

We would like to extend a warm welcome and invitation to the upcoming GoSmokies fall hike and picnic to those who have never before attended a GoSmokies event.

There are many readers out there in GoSmokies land whom we do not know. Even though there is a core membership who actively post blogs, photos and comments, any given post may receive several hundred visits,…

We recently logged our one-hundredth cemetery in the National Park and felt that an update on the Remembrance project was in order.

First off, we are honored to announce that we will be presenters at the 25th annual Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge, TN, this coming January. Our presentation is titled "Remembrance: Backcountry Cemeteries in Great Smoky Mountains National Park" and is set for Thursday, January 29, 2015, 1:30pm to 2:30pm. All Wilderness Wildlife Week…

It is the Nature of the Universe that cemeteries are situated at the top of some hill, and you must huff your way up to them. At least you have the consolation of knowing that after your visit it is all downhill. No such fortune with these two cemeteries. The two gravesites are on rises relative their surroundings, but to access them you enter the National Park from private land outside its boundaries and descend into a valley that was once populated. It is a seven mile round trip to…

Southern hospitality notwithstanding, mountain folk with deep roots sometimes are stereotyped as viewing outsiders and tourists skeptically as "foreigners" and would just as soon you move on - a wary mistrust from those who were born in the mountains and whose forebears were evicted from their land by high-minded intruders. We paid an unplanned visit to the two Tow String cemeteries just outside the National Park near Cherokee, NC - a pair of nosy strangers poking…

The first installment of this two-part series might well have been titled "None of Our Business." The present-day descendants now tending the cemeteries did not ask our opinion of their work, nor do they care what we might think. Visit enough backcountry cemeteries and it is easy to start thinking of them as historic sites, rather than the personal heritage of relatives living today. In our eyes they become museum pieces to be preserved unaltered.

Given the choice, hands down we will nearly always pick exploring the trail over exploring the library. So in the absence of a blog or other material close at hand, often as not we have no idea what to expect when setting out to find a backcountry cemetery. Such was the case with the Abraham Law Cemetery. All we had to go on was a set of GPS coordinates (which labeled the place "White Oak Sink Cemetery") with no other cemetery for miles around (although there could be gravesites outside…

No cemetery has captured our imaginations the way these two did, or exacted more of our time and energies. In the end, documenting them involved two trips over the mountain to North Carolina, two sessions picking the brain of a National Park ranger familiar with these cemeteries, a visit to the National Park library, an email exchange with…

This little cemetery came to our attention before we ever knew what it was called. Looking at the maps in the "History Hikes of the Smokies" guidebook, we noticed a cemetery just spittin' distance off Little River Road, upstream from Metcalf Bottoms Picnic Area. Only later did we notice you have to spit all the way across the river, as the cemetery is above the opposite…

If ever you wanted evidence of the observation that each cemetery has its own personality, these three could be a master class. Even though they overlook the same waterway, they are as unalike as they can be. Much is in the eye of the beholder, and should we return we might have completely new impressions. You might visit any of them and see something totally different and decide we are nuts.

If only we had a time machine to go back into the past and see what really happened. In a sense, exploring the old sites IS a form of time travel, but that teleporter machine would sure come in handy. It would assuredly minimize a great deal of speculation - and the Injun Creek valley has its share.

Injun Creek Trail is one of those best-of-both-worlds situations: a trail in good condition with foot logs and easy access to the trailhead, rich in history, but not on the official…

If we had a nice, crisp twenty dollar bill for every time we have floundered fruitlessly through the hinterland looking in the wrong place for some historical site, we could at least put gas in the car for the trips.

We visited this small cemetery along Lower Mount Cammerer Trail before we decided to create the Remembrance blog, so our photography and notation was very limited while we were there. We weren't documentarians that day - we were tourists. (And with so many…

From our twenty-first century perspective looking backward, the timelines of the Smoky Mountain cemeteries can be vague abstractions, and distant ones at that. All the cemeteries are just old. We personally remember distinct differences between the years 2000 and 2010. But 1900 and 1910 are foreign countries in our minds, and one seems pretty much the same as the other - but not so to those who inhabited those times. After being fed a steady diet of Cades Cove postcards, we might forget…

Some backcountry cemeteries are overgrown and neglected, while others, if not immaculate, at least appear to be tended. The discrepancy might be due to National Park Service maintenance rotation, although with the cemeteries in this series positioned so close together, you'd think they'd hit them all in one pass. More likely the tended sites have periodic caretakers with some personal connection to the place.